


Grief

by walbergr



Category: Battlestar Galactica (2003)
Genre: F/M, Grief/Mourning, pre-mini
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-11-12
Updated: 2015-11-12
Packaged: 2018-05-01 08:00:05
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 591
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5198294
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/walbergr/pseuds/walbergr
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Kara grieves.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Grief

It hits her immediately, of course, in the wracking almost deafening way that someone’s death inevitably does. He’s gone, and she’ll never see him again. Not his face, not his smile, not his hands or the arc of his neck or the elemental blue of his eyes. 

Gone, gone. 

But then, after, after the grief has washed through her like a flood, leaving her foundations crumbling and her uprights warped, after she’s piled up what’s left of her into a loose form that takes her shape, after his brother and his father have gone, after it’s all over, it really hits her. That it will never be over. 

She has to remember the pain anew every time she remembers being with him, every time she walks into a bar they drank at, or down a street they walked. She has to remember him when she opens a drawer and sees it tidy, the little ghosts of his efforts stacked or lined up in a row. And she remembers him when a drawer was a mess, how it would bother him. How on a Tuesday night, all of a sudden, he’d get up from reading or watching TV and pull everything down from the shelves and re-organize. How she told him he was crazy and how she’d give anything to have him back, creating order from chaos.

Eventually, though, it recedes. He’s there, always, a hand resting on her shoulder, but he doesn’t pull at her like before, doesn’t yank her back into him bodily, he whispers in her ear, doesn’t scream. 

The first time she kisses another man, he’s screaming, and she wants to scream too, wants to tell him that if he were there she wouldn’t need to, and Godsdamn him why isn’t he here?

The man in the bar couldn’t be more his opposite, couldn’t be more different from the man she loved. Short, wide, blond, a crew cut, and a grin. His lips against hers are warm and soft and he smells wrong, and it’s like she’s been catapulted into pavement from a great height. She can feel her face, stony and tense as she pulls back. His reaction is her lover’s opposite too: a little pissed, a little mean, sneering and unkind. The ghost pulls her back into his arms, keeps her fists from flying, brings her near tears and walks her away. 

Her second kiss after is better. A cracked rib, not a contorted spine, a bruise, not a beating. She’s fine until he touches her, just lightly, at the waist, curves his fingers around her. 

It’s all wrong. Everything about it is wrong. She needs to swallow her tongue, to get through it, to experience this thing, this constellation of touching someone not him, and so she does. She thinks next time it will be easier, less painful. She thinks next time he’ll hover to the side instead of gripping her by her arms and shaking her, thinks they’ll both learn to understand. 

She prays about it. Goes to the temple, asks him to let her go and hopes he never will. The pain is so real, so visceral, it seems like the only way she can remember he was there at all. She never wants to forget. 

One day, walking to class, she realizes that not one time this morning, digging through her socks, leaving the spent coffee grounds on the counter, did the pain of his absence surface.

She stops there, and turns back to her apartment. Calls the Commander, accepts his offer.


End file.
